I’ve been threatening to do this for along time: A playthrough of Bee with critical and gameplay commentary. It’s my favorite Emily Short work! This will not be a tour guide. While I have played it before, I suspect that I have not yet seen a fourth of its content.
The commentary will largely consist of unmediated or less mediated responses, then.
What is Bee? According to Emily Short:
Bee is story of a home-schooled girl preparing to compete in the national spelling bee, dealing with various small crises with family and friends, and gradually coming to terms with the clash of subcultures involved in belonging to a family like hers.
While it was originally authored in Varytale, Autum Chen assisted updating the Dendry port that is available now. That port has been a gift to a new generation of fans who were previously unable to experience the work in full.
I write this post to ask a couple of questions. The first is technical or procedural. I am not aware of a way to provide a transcript of Bee, though I think persons used to parser-based Let’s Play threads might expect to have one. That’s question one: any advice for providing/retaining quotations? I am fairly certain that I could scour the source code, but that would be spoilery for me.
A related question: one way to retain the text would be to do a more traditional “let’s play” on twitch (with an archive on youtube) with subsequent write-ups here. I could do sometime during the day (North America) or early-mid evening. Thoughts on time (or anything else)?
If I do a twitch playthrough, I will likely read aloud.
I welcome any other thoughts or suggestions regarding this activity, which I’d like to start as soon as my last Leather Goddesses of Phobos essay is out.
From what I recall about BEE: In the context of a let’s play situation is there is a lot of text. This makes it a little less-conducive to a large group LP or a livestream since there will be long stretches of just narration like an audio book and fewer opportunities for discussion and chatter.
Due to the slice-of-life personal memoir structure of the story, agency is low, though that’s not a bad thing. As I remember choices are like [Study your vocabulary words] [Skip studying and go ice skating with your friends]. Between chapters you get a random choice of what chapter comes next with little insight, and chapters can repeat. While these are personal choices that make sense in the context of the story, they’re low-stakes and not the kind of thing that inspires exciting in the moment discussion.
As far as transcript: unless you can copy/paste from Dendry and there’s not something fancy to be done with simultaneous text-to-speech and then speech to text to produce the playthrough transcript, I’d screenshot everything and then manually type everything out, potentially employing speech to text for assistance.
TL;DR: I suggest the material would be more interesting in a highly-curated NPR “This American Life” structure with edited snippets of discussion and gameplay alternating with formal narration/audiobook performance and interviews (especially if you could interview Emily Short and Autumn Chen) rather than a rowdy random let’s play.
The concern I have is not so much “can I retain this text on this screen right now” and more “how can I capture the text of an hour or more of gameplay”. Bee clears the screen every three or four clicks. As a critic, I often don’t know what I’d like to quote before I’ve seen the work in total.
Video makes the most makes sense barring some miracle of technology. Hopefully, I can search the video for the text I need.
I’m interested in @HanonO 's suggestions regarding a video digest; I think the only impediment there is available time, which isn’t a reason not to do it. Would love to hear what others think!
However, I strongly disagree that the decisions are low stakes; they are choices that generate text and lead to future outcomes, just like the choices made while, for instance, tricking the unseen horror in Enchanter. The main difference is the absence of game over screens. The protagonist still succeeds or fails in her endeavors, and her character develops according to our choices. I believe there are multiple endings that require a titration of choices that is ultimately one large puzzle.
As for whether that entertains people, you may have a point there. I’m not sure.
But that doesn’t mean a digest is a bad idea. I’m most interested in doing what interests people ( within reason) so I hope others will weigh in!
Looks like dendry has at least some code related to keeping a transcript. Though whether it works or is just a feature-in-progress, and how you turn it on, how you save the result – those might be questions for Autumn. But I’ll have a quick poke at it.
Edit: it’s just a stub: adding the data structures to an array, not logging the final output. So it’d need some code in the UI to let you download it in any sort of useful form… still, it’s a start. Might not take me too long to bodge something together.
Hmm, yeah, I confirmed that I can build Bee and change the engine code and it incorporates into the build. I’m looking through the code and it seems pretty straightforward. But I’m gonna be good and get some sleep and not try to do it tonight.
Thank you for looking into the transcripting! If you’re implementing something with it, you can also send a pull request to the dendry repo and/or Bee repo if you want…
Well, credit where credit is due: most of the machinery was already there. Someone (I didn’t try to check the history to see whether this was Autumn or Ian) had already done the part that required significant knowledge of the codebase. I only spent about 20 minutes hooking it up (and then an hour-plus fiddling with formatting for no particular reason, heh).
Following up: any thoughts on doing a digest? or other thoughts requests etc? Topics of interest? This will be a different kind of activity for me so I welcome comments!
I think as with most storylet games, there are more story parts and more reusable/repeatable ones – it does a somewhat OK job of having different text on many of the repeatable ones, but not all.
Where was I going with that? Oh yeah, I think it’s relatively clear which is which, so if you’re chasing down all the story threads in multiple playthroughs you’re going to have a bunch of repeated content so some kind of digest or elision might make sense for that. Or maybe in the later stages of a full play through to the national bee. But it’s not like parser players have been posting every scrap of their fiddling around trying to solve the puzzles either, so I think that’ll work out naturally if you’re posting transcript snippets here.
And depending on which ending you’re going for… I don’t remember the whole structure but there’s at least one way to end it with a pretty short story, about 7K words or so when I was testing the transcript code. Versus more like 20K+ if you’re following the spelling bee thread through to its conclusion.
I haven’t (yet) played Bee, so I may have more specific thoughts once I do, but for now—you’ve done some podcasting before, right? I’ve recently found that I adore series’ of podcast episodes doing a deep dive on a specific book or other work, and I would definitely listen to a podcast where you discuss Bee! I personally am more likely to listen to a podcast than watch video content (given podcasts’ more portable and ears-only nature).
OK. I appreciate the responses! My impression is that the video/twitch let’s play isn’t high on anyone’s list. Thinking about a thread here and/or a podcast, I believe that I can do an audio version of the thread with some more thoughts, etc, but I won’t have time to do two completely different texts for thread and podcast. Audiences can pick the format that interests them most, or both if just to hear my silky smooth MFA-trained reading voice, if nothing else
My assumption is that the podcast will drop once the thread is complete.
Any comments on this approach? I’ll try to start next week.
OK! The last LGOP post is up, so I can begin work on this. Do I have the most current version of Bee (with transcript support)? Once that’s clear I can get going. Hope to see some lively conversation there!
(edit: pull requests sent)